The city is one of the most dazzling subjects in the history of photography: KUNST HAUS WIEN presents with the exhibiton Street. Life. Photography Icons of Street Photography from seven decades. From Merry Alpern, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank to Lee Friedlander or Martin Parr – with more than 35 photographic positions and over 200 works, the exhibition deals with the radical changes and aesthetic developments in street photography from the 1930s to the present.
Street Life, Crashes, Public Transfer, Anonymity, and Alienation – in five kaleidoscope-like chapters, the exhibition shows the central themes of street photography and draws visitors into a wide variety of visual worlds, some of which seem surreal. Analogue photography is alongside digital photography, the 35mm camera alongside the large-format camera, black-and-white photography meets colour photography and familiar icons of photographic history.
International classics of street photography are associated with young, contemporary positions such as Mohamed Bourouissa, Harri Pälviranta or Austrian artists such as Alex Dietrich and Lies Maculan – and open up a new perspective on the different spaces of the city that the observation of the urban environment offered in the past and today. Street. Life. Photography sheds light on the continuing fascination that this theme has exerted on 20th and 21st century photography, producing a genre of its own.
